The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
In computer networking and telecommunications, a pseudowire is an emulation of a layer 2 point-to-point connection-oriented service over a packet-switching network (PSN). The pseudowire emulates the operation of a “transparent wire” carrying the service. Examples of services being carried over the “wire” may be Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Frame Relay, Ethernet, low-rate Time-division multiplexing (TDM), or Synchronous optical networking (SONET), while the packet network may be Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), Internet Protocol (IPv4 or IPv6), or Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol Version 3 (L2TPv3).